Landfall? (Part Three)

CCXLII

Persistent among the stories about the fate of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan is the theory, which some take as fact, that Amelia and Fred were taken prisoner by the Japanese military and were ultimately executed. 

Koshu Maru: According to one theory of Earhart’s disappearance, this ship retrieved Earhart, Noonan, and the crippled Electra, taking them to Jaluit Atoll before they were transported to Saipan. It is variously described as a survey ship (what was it surveying?) and more significantly a seaplane tender able to retrieve aircraft from the water. According to its log it was in the general vicinity of Howland Island when Earhart vanished

 

Although there is no hard proof that this was their fate, there is a surfeit of circumstantial evidence that points to the unpleasant possibility that Amelia and Fred were decapitated while prisoners of the Japanese.

 

 

The top photo purports to show Noonan (left), Earhart (center) and the Electra (right) being towed behind the Koshu Maru in Jaluit Harbor. The middle picture is A.E., back to the camera, and Fred Noonan during the Worldflight, for comparison. Some experts say the figures in the top photo are Earhart and Noonan; others question the photo’s provenance

One fact that motivates Earhartologists to believe that Amelia survived the downing of her plane only to be killed is the lack of evidence surrounding any other possible fate for her. After 20:14 GMT on July 2, 1937, the Electra vanished as if it had never existed at all. It is possible of course that the powerless plane nosedived into the sea, but such a violent end would likely have left some traces behind --- even if, like MH370, it took a year or more for them to wash ashore somewhere. This never happened.

A cell at Garapan Prison on Saipan that reputedly held A.E. and Noonan

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Even prior to the Second World War strange rumors began circulating among the populations and various archipelagoes of the Pacific that a Caucasian couple, a man and a woman, were being held on one of the Japanese-controlled islands of the region. The details vary from island group to island group, but the consistency of the basic story is powerful evidence of its reality. Whether the couple were Earhart and Noonan or another hapless couple, perhaps missionaries, may never be known. 

A very heavily retouched (and therefore questionable) photo of initials reportedly carved into a wall of the cell at Garapan Prison. No unretouched version accompanied it

In some variants of the story there is no airplane mentioned --- the couple are described as injured castaways found hiding on one of the small islets that make up an atoll.

A woman, often identified as Amelia Earhart, at Garapan Prison

In other variants of the story, a damaged airplane plays a central role in the story, either having landed under its own power on or near any of a half-dozen different atolls, or having sunk at sea to have its crew rescued by fishermen, or having been retrieved by a Japanese tender.  Sometimes the plane is gold, sometimes black, and sometimes silver. Sometimes it lands intact at Saipan, sometimes it comes down elsewhere badly damaged.

Hardly

According to some versions of the tale, the rescued pair are two men, or a man and a woman, or a woman wearing men’s clothing. She has short hair or medium length hair. He has a big nose. He is wearing a bandage ‘round his head. She has kind eyes.  He is quiet. She is uncooperative. He is uncooperative. She has dysentery.  He has malaria.

A close reading tells us that he saw what he thought was A.E.’s grave

In every version, both people are executed, sometimes shortly after capture, and sometimes late in the war when the Americans are about to take whatever island the story is set upon. In every version, they are buried in shallow graves or a shallow grave after being shot or beheaded with a samurai sword.  

 

In no version does she give her name. No one is certain what language either person speaks. 

The death of Australian Leonard Siffleet, an Airborne Commando, in October 1943. Local Japanese commanders had full discretion as to how they treated prisoners. When the death penalty was imposed beheading was a fairly common practice, as was ritual crucifixion, and immolation. Occasionally, Allied prisoners were cannibalized. However, many Japanese commanders insisted that their prisoners be treated honorably. Conditions varied widely. Reginald Blyth, for example, became a student of Zen while a POW. Other men were routinely tortured. It is believed by some that Earhart and Noonan were kept prisoner until the day the Americans invaded Saipan in 1944. Some Marines claim to have seen the Electra intact on one of Saipan’s airfields and to have found the aviators’ fresh graves

Then there are wartime stories told by American sailors and soldiers that they were ordered to exhume and rebury the bodies of whom they were told or whom they presumed were Noonan and Earhart. These disinterrments took place on any of a dozen islands. The wrecked Electra, it is said, was ordered to be burned. No reason was given then, and no one speculates now. A nameless Pfc finds a valise in a supply tent on Truk in the Caroline Islands. It contains Earhart’s passport and other flight documents. Impossibly, given human nature, he keeps not a thing as evidence, not even a trifle as a collectible. Their bones are found, put aside for medical examination, and lost as an exigency of wartime. 

 

She was a spy, it’s said, or at least that’s what the Japanese believed. FDR knew of their capture, but did nothing to save them, being unwilling to risk war with Japan. Or, FDR was willing, but the isolationists in his Administration pressured him not to take up an armed conflict.

John Toland wrote a polemic, Infamy, blaming FDR for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Since then, others have blamed FDR for Earhart’s death. According to these Earhartologists, FDR knew that A.E. and Noonan were prisoners of the Japanese but refused to rescue them because to do so would have disclosed that the U.S. had broken Japanese military codes. It’s plausible, except for the fact that the Japanese offered to join in the search for Earhart and that the U.S. Navy overflew (and photographed) Japanese installations in the mid-Pacific during the search-and-rescue phase. Supposedly, the Japanese did not object due to the fame of the missing flyer --- but turning her over would have made more sense if Japan wanted to maintain the covert status of the military build-up that was under way

The idea that Amelia was a “spy” is absurd, and arises from the fact that the U.S. Government classified all the correspondence it received from her regarding the Worldflight at her own request. There was, however, nothing secretive about her notes to Franklin Delano Roosevelt or to Eleanor Roosevelt, or, for that matter, her correspondence to the Navy and the State Department. As the President and First Lady, both FDR and ER, Amelia and George’s personal friends, were uniquely positioned to provide her assistance --- literally any assistance she might need on earth --- with the Worldflight. In return, undoubtedly, they asked Earhart to “observe” whatever she could in whatever nations she visited, an innocuous request that would hardly rise to the level of espionage. Mata Hari she was not.

 

It may, however, have been a distinction without a difference, particularly to the low-level Japanese garrison commanders in the Marshall Islands if in fact Amelia had made an emergency landfall there after failing to find Howland Island (or had been rescued at sea).  

 

Prior to 1937, Japan held only Taiwan, northeastern China, and Korea, but in 1937 it seized the remaining areas marked in red, and in 1941 Japan seized vast swaths of south central China down to already-occupied French Indochina

By 1937, relations between the U.S. and Japan, once fast friends, were at an all-time low and still sinking. Although the United States publicly avowed a policy of neutrality, non-intervention, and isolationism, those tenets applied far more to the European continent than to the Asian continent. U.S. interests in Hawaii and the Philippines had to be protected, and the State Department was top-heavy with Sinophiles, the sons and grandsons of Protestant missionaries sent to China in the 19^th Century. More than a few well-seasoned State Department hands had been born in China and considered it their second nation; and even without the spur of religion, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s own Delano and Aspinall ancestors had made their fortunes in clipper ships and in the China trade just as had Juan Trippe’s family.

Despite the “special relationship” between the U.S. and the U.K.,  America had an especial fondness for China that gave it the status of a “pet” ally. The American Volunteer Group (A.V.G. or “Flying Tigers”) was a unit of mercenary American combat fliers aiding China in the 1930s. In truth, the A.V.G. was secretly backed by the U.S. military

Japan’s seizure of Manchuria in 1931 and its establishment of Manchukuo as a puppet state in 1932 did not sit well with Washington D.C.  Further slow Japanese encroachment on China during the next five years angered the China Lobby but did not lead to U.S. intervention on the Asian mainland. 

Shanghai was a commercial city where unbridled wealth lived cheek-by-jowl with grinding poverty. The International Settlement was a Euro-American enclave in which Westerners conducted business according to Western rules and without Chinese interference. It was a place of spectacular success and incredible corruption. Although there was a European exodus in 1937 after the International Settlement was shelled and came under Japanese domination, most of the remaining Westerners were let alone. Shanghai became a safe zone for Jews fleeing the Holocaust

 

Constant Japanese criticism and objection to Pan American’s 1935 introduction of the Sunchasers was seemingly intended to irritate the United States. That year, Japan began attacking civilian Chinese airliners. Japanese agents were also accused of attempted sabotage of the M-130s.

CNAC (China National Air Corporation) was a joint venture airline owned 55%-45% between the Chinese government and Pan American Airways. It operated in some of the most difficult wartime political conditions ever experienced over the most hostile terrain on the planet, and did so very successfully. After 1937, the Japanese chose to hunt and kill its airliners despite their partial U.S. pedigree;  they also hunted and killed the planes of Eurasia Air, a joint venture airline owned in equal parts by Nationalist China, Stalinist Russia, and Nazi Germany. Despite Japan’s affinity for Germany and Soviet neutrality, Deutschland’s airplanes were seemingly fair game

Japan’s wholesale swallowing of China’s maritime provinces in the Second Sino-Japanese War beginning in 1937 led to the Sack of Shanghai and the Rape of Nanking, both remarkably brutal and ongoing as Amelia Earhart winged her way around the world. Her overflight of the Marshall Islands in the early hours of July 2^nd would have been seen as a violation of Japanese airspace and any return trip as a reconnaissance mission. Even if she was in dire straits and in need of rescue, the local Japanese authorities (“hard men” who showed irrational “fury” toward the occasional Westerners who came there, according to the Marshallese) would have treated her less like an envoy and more like an agent. It is entirely possible that any objections on her part or on Noonan’s would have been met with abuse, incarceration, corporal punishment, or even capital punishment, depending on the vagaries of the Commandant who decided their fate wherever they may have been.

Amelia with her document case in 1937. According to several sources the briefcase turned up after the war and intact; but no one seems to know what became of it

In short, there is no definitive evidence that Earhart and Noonan became unwilling guests of the Japanese government in the summer of 1937. Given a great deal of circumstantial evidence the possibility cannot be dismissed, however.